Why I Almost Let Malaysia’s Market Size Kill Favoriot’s Biggest Dream

The Number I Kept to Myself

For years I carried a number I never said out loud in meetings. Thirty four million. That is the size of Malaysia. It is the size of the market that raised Favoriot, fed our first customers, and forgave our first mistakes.

It was also, quietly, the size of the ceiling above my own ambition.

You knew this a long time ago. Why does it hurt to admit it only now, at fifty something, with a PhD and a company that people already respect?

Because admitting it means admitting that comfort had a cost. And I do not think anyone enjoys discovering that the very thing that kept them safe is now the thing quietly holding them back.

Through My Own Eyes

I did not start Favoriot as a young man with nothing to lose. I started it at fifty six, after MIMOS, after Celcom, after a PhD I earned while still trying to prove something to myself. I had already failed in public before Favoriot even existed. Raqib, a smartwatch, did not survive. Favorsense did not survive. Dscover did not survive.

Each failure took something from me. Confidence, mostly, and a little bit of the certainty that I knew what I was doing. But each one also handed me a single sentence I could not have written any other way: customers do not want more sensors, they want to stop feeling blind about what is already happening inside their own operations.

That sentence, operational blindness, is the only thing from those years I would not trade back.

Through the Eyes of the Team Who Stayed

I think often about the people who joined Favoriot when it was still unproven. Engineers who chose a small Malaysian platform company over safer jobs at bigger names. They did not sign up to serve one country forever. They signed up because they believed the problem we were solving was bigger than the market we were solving it in.

I imagine what it must feel like from their side, building something at 2am that works beautifully, then watching it get used mostly by customers a short drive away. Talented people do not stay motivated by small ceilings. They stay motivated by the size of the problem, not the size of the postcode.

If I have learned one thing about leadership in this company, it is that I owe them a bigger horizon than the one I have been offering.

Through the Eyes of Someone We Have Not Met Yet

Somewhere right now, in Nairobi or Riyadh or Ho Chi Minh City, there is a founder running a hardware company. Good sensors, good gateways, good relationships with customers. And somewhere in the last few months, a customer asked them a question that made them go quiet for a second: where is the dashboard, where is the alert, can we host this locally, can we put our own name on it.

I know that silence. I have lived inside it.

That founder does not know Favoriot exists yet. They do not know that eight years of our own local failures produced exactly the missing piece they need. That gap, between what they already built and what they still need, is not a sales opportunity to me. It feels more like an obligation. We found the answer to a question they are quietly struggling with, and we have been too comfortable to bring it to them.

The Lessons I Am Carrying Into This Next Chapter

Build the platform before you chase the market, not the other way round. We needed years of local mistakes before the Operational Data Platform was strong enough to stand next to anyone, anywhere.

Credibility travels further than a brand name does. Nobody overseas knew Favoriot five years ago. Some of them already know me, through papers, through talks, through the slow accumulation of trust that has nothing to do with advertising.

The partners worth having were never going to come from a cold email. They come from warm introductions and founder to founder honesty, the same honesty I wish someone had extended to me back when Favoriot was unproven and unknown.

And the hardest lesson, the one I am still learning: waiting for the home market to feel finished is not patience, it is fear wearing a more respectable name.

What I Am Choosing Now

So this is the choice in front of us. Stay where it is comfortable and let a good company quietly become a small one. Or reach for the founders, the engineers, the cities and the farms outside our borders who are living the exact problem we already know how to solve.

I am choosing the second one, not because I am certain it will work, but because the alternative, staying safe inside thirty four million people, has stopped feeling like enough of a reason to keep going.

Malaysia gave Favoriot everything it needed except the size of the dream. The world is next, and I would rather fail reaching for it than succeed quietly inside a ceiling I helped build myself.

What ceiling have you built for yourself without noticing, and what would it take for you to finally name it?

I wrote a deeper technical take on this over at IoT World .